Thade Out

However you feel about Tim Burton's new ''re-imagining'' of ''Planet of the Apes'' (and I feel it's an unimaginative, boring, set-bound exercise in studio marketing), I think that we can all agree on one thing: What the hell was that ending all about?

WARNING! SPOILER AHEAD!

If you haven't seen ''Planet of the Apes'' yet and you want to be surprised, crawl back under your rock or call Moviefone for showtimes.

The rest of you, read on.

It must have sounded really cool in some production meeting: ''And Marky Mark will get back to Earth, right, and he'll land on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, right, and -- here's the cool part -- the face on the statue won't be Lincoln's, see, it'll be General Thade's!'' That gem is one of a reported eight twist endings that the filmmakers came up with to try and top the original ''Planet of the Apes'' Statue of Liberty shocker.

It fails miserably. Where the sight of Charlton Heston pounding his fists at the realization that mankind doomed itself into simian domination resonated on a multitude of levels (plot, theme, and just sheer cool), this new kicker smacks of desperation, of a need to leave the viewer with a ''wow'' -- regardless of the fact that it doesn't make a lick of sense.

It took me a solid weekend to figure out the whole Ape-raham Lincoln mess. Mind you, what I came up with requires a total excusal of logic, a complete disregard of the facts, and, well, a stiff drink. Here goes: Air Force Captain Leo Davidson (Wahlberg) takes off for home, leaving Thade (Tim Roth) locked up in the control room of the derelict space station on that planet that is not Earth. Somehow, Thade manages to escape from his pen, activate one of those earplug shaped spacepods, and head off into the temporal storm. Thade then goes back in time to pre-Civil War Earth, manages to convince the Union that he's the general for the job, wins the war, and becomes president.

Of course, none of that explains how the apes manage to supplant humanity without a nuclear disaster, unless General Thade got his Wilt Chamberlain on with any gorilla he could find, or how they took the intellectual leaps necessary to develop internal combustion or radio communications. (Hey, I never said it was a water-tight explanation, I just said that it was the best I could come up with.)

All of this is to say that in the great pantheon of twist endings -- where films like ''No Way Out,'' ''Wild Things,'' ''Fight Club,'' ''The Sixth Sense,'' and the original ''Apes'' reign supreme -- this new ''Planet'' doesn't rule, no matter what the ads say.

Want to argue about the ''Apes'' ending? Tell us what you think

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